Judith Martin Quotes

People have one year after the wedding to send a gift. Thank-you notes must be written immediately. If you don't receive an acknowledgment within three months, phone and ask if it was received. If the bride and groom are embarrassed, fine. They deserve to be.

Your wedding day is supposed to be your big day, and yet a lot of engaged couples find that instead of creating an event that will be important to them, they're dodging through a minefield of modern etiquette traps.

I love going to other people's weddings, but I have never desired a big white wedding for myself, and it has never been put on me as a pressure, an expectation.

I think that there's etiquette for every means of communication. People are very judgmental and have strict rules. I don't think you should end a relationship with a Post-it note. I know some people who get offended when an e-mail is sent as a "thank you" note instead of a hand-written card.

Shh! Don't talk with your mouth full.

I was brought up in a way that when you're at a dinner party, you don't grab a chip unless it's been offered to everyone else. It's the manners of being brought up by English parents.

People buy pads all the time, because they want to write stuff down. We're never going to get away from paper, ever. People like writing; that's why more people are writing more real thank-you notes now - not just to stand out, but because there's something about pen to paper, about holding something cool in your hands.

One of the pleasures of staying with friends is that you get to browse their shelves. I always arrive with a book, but I almost never read it. It would be like sitting at their dinner table and opening a packet of sandwiches.

Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

I make a distinction between manners and etiquette - manners as the principles, which are eternal and universal, etiquette as the particular rules which are arbitrary and different in different times, different situations, different cultures.

Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

It's very important with these young people who are graduating and getting married to write thank-you notes.

A bride is a bride the first time around. The white dress and the white veil are symbolic. So many people are breaking the rules that people don't know what the rules are.

It's not polite to refuse to dress for a parly. It's an insult to your hostess. After all, correct dress is a part of good manners.

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

I have no problems with buying tampons. I am a fairly modern man. But apparently they're not a "proper" present. "Happy birthday, mum!"

To dismiss a guest is a more ungracious act than not to admit him at all.

All children in the '50s were taught manners, they were taught to say please and thank you, they were taught not to be rude. And I'm seeing some problems today where somebody's losing a job because they made fun of a fat lady that couldn't fit in the elevator. I mean that was the sort of thing that, when I was eight years old, my mother made it very clear to me that that was not okay to say that kind of stuff.

Etiquette requires the presumption of good until the contrary is proved.

Now, it is well known, that a man may with more impunity be guilty of an actual breach either of real good breeding or of good morals, than appear ignorant of the most minute point of fashionable etiquette.

Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.

The good thing about being gay, though, I always believed, is that you didn't make anyone go to a wedding. Nobody wants to go to a wedding. Nobody. It kind of bothers me now that you have to go to gay weddings, too. I don't care. It's still a wedding. And I would give anybody double gifts if they would elope.

You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you...There are plenty of people who say, 'We don't care about etiquette, but we can't stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don't want him around!' Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them because their behavior is unbearable.

Shame is the proper reaction when one has purposefully violated the accepted behavior of society. Inflicting it is etiquette's response when its rules are disobeyed. The law has all kinds of nasty ways of retaliating when it is disregarded, but etiquette has only a sense of social shame to deter people from treating others in ways they know are wrong. So naturally Miss Manners wants to maintain the sense of shame. Some forms of discomfort are fully justified, and the person who feels shame ought to be dealing with removing its causes rather than seeking to relieve the symptoms.